Identify NIC driver and supported driver version for ESXi server

Lately I troubleshoot some NIC driver problems in VMware ESXi 5.x. During the troubleshooting I needed to Identify the NIC driver, software version used and the latest driver version supported by VMware. Here are the steps outlined.

Identify the NIC driver and software version:

Make a SSH connection to the ESXi host

Identify all the NIC’s by using the following command: esxcli network nic list

In this example you can see that Intel (igb) and Broadcom (tg3) NICs are used.

To identify the driver version of the Broadcom NIC (vmnic0) use the following command: ethtool -i vmnic0

The output list the driver and firmware version. Run the “ethtool” command for all different NICs drivers to obtain the driver version. With the introduction of the new native mode driver, ethtool is no longer supported. Using ethtool with a native drivers results in the following warning “Can not get control fd: No such file or directory”. The following esxcli command list the driver and firmware version: esxcli network nic get -n vmnic0

Identify the latest NIC driver supported by VMware:

We need to find the hardware ID’s of the NIC by using the following command: vmkchdev -L | grep “vmnic”

2 Responses to Identify NIC driver and supported driver version for ESXi server

Or one can use the command esxcli software vib install -d offline-bundle.zip file and reboot the host. Maintenance mode is required on the ESXi host. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2005205 has all the methods listed.